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“The hunger and drive in this classic indie pop dreampop, a massive treat for Ride and Lushfans (i.e. the harder hitting, big beat side of shoegaze), is palpable.” So declared our inimitable leader, Jack Rabid, who awarded this Sacramento, California-based foursome’s new album, Detour, a coveted #2 ranking in Jack’s Top 40 listing in the latest Big Takeover #74 (order it here). “Nothing soft about this science; Detour is just wonderful.”

Needless to say, we are delighted to premiere the band’s new video, directed by Tyler Kinney. Click play and find out what’s got Mr. Rabid so excited! (The Big Takeover)

“Sometimes you just gotta cry it out. Whenever we need a soundtrack for an earnest tear fest, we turn to JP three-piece IAN. Led by the incisive and insightful singer-songwriter Jillian Medford, this group packs a wallop on anguished odes to emotional growth spurts, framed in simple but soaring garage pop. We can’t get enough of this poignant songstress, so were beyond psyched to announce the release of her new album, the first with a full band. This release was recorded by Mark Fede who has also done work with other legendary Boston acts such as Guerilla Toss, Designer, and the Channels. The new tape is out now via BUFU”

“I can see this guy recording himself in a basement, or tucked into a corner behind a couch with a ratty and worn hand-knit blanket thrown over it, covering up the tatters and ripped edges. That’s what this music sounds like, existential, get me through, i’m gonna make it type noise jams.” -microphone memory emotion”

“Canadian band Alvvays (pronounced Always) are more indie than you. The lenses in their glasses are real, they know who all the bands pictured on their Tumblr actually are, and they have made one of the most jangle-filled and impressive debut albums of 2014 so far. The band started as a solo project for Molly Rankin, the daughter of famous Celtic musician John Morris Rankin, who died in a road accident when Molly was just 12 years old. But Alvvays don’t focus on the morbid; instead they offer a diary-like insight into their lives. “Alcoholism, depression and parties and relationships seem to always exist in whatever I write,” Rankin said in a recent interview. After picking up Molly’s best friend, keys player and childhood neighbour Kerri Maclellan plus bandmates Alec O’Hanley, Brian Murphy and Phil MacIsaac along the way, the Toronto group worked on their debut album with Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh and producer John Agnello as well as fellow Canadian Chad VanGaalen at his excellently named Yoko Eno studio in Calgary. Together they elicit the twinkly thrills of C86-era indie, The Magnetic Fields, Pavement or, if you prefer, Best Coast. The band Alvvays most often resemble, however, is 4AD’s Camera Obscura. ‘Archie, Marry Me’ is by far the best song on this album – a bona fide hit in waiting that could keep Hollywood’s latest manic pixie dream girl company in love scenes for evermore. It also sounds like Camera Obscura’s equally brilliant ‘French Navy’ played at the wrong speed. Alvvays are a lot of things, but original isn’t one of them. However, nothing on this record fails to impress. It’s full of sun-bleached summer jams like ‘Adult Diversion’, a tale of obsessively following a loved one from afar, and the Phil Spector-esque ‘Party Police’. The spectral ‘Red Planet’ concludes the album with the sound of waves lapping against the shore, set against a woozy synthesizer as Rankin sings, “I waited out here for you, but that was just delusional.” It’s a stunning end to a great debut record laced with melancholy and beautiful moments” (NME)

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“Take the trip down on the 94… where pockmarked streets run roughshod through our “kind of” town and tough talk reigns supreme… mis-mgmt and misdirection strongly encouraged [noblesse oblige] – express/discard at will”

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“LINDA GUILALA are in a state of grace. We have already mentioned the intense production activity that Iván and Eva have been doing with groups like AXOLOTES MEXICANOS, WHEN NALDA BECAME PUNK and LOS BONSÁIS, but the release of “Xeristar” made it clear that we were dealing with a group at the top of their game and that, with the incorporation of Bruno Mosquera on guitar, they had gained even more intensity and electricity (if that’s even possible). That’s why we want to make the most of this fantastic moment and put out a digital single with two previously unreleased songs. The single starts off with one of the songs taken from “Xeristar”, “Verano”, which tells one of those stories that it is impossible not to fall for, with echoes of LOS PLANETAS, the electric strength of MY BLOODY VALENTINE, and the urgent pop of punk groups like TIGER TRAP. It is perfectly suited to waking our minds up these summer vacations. “Jaime, Iván Y Marta”, the first of the previously unreleased tracks, is even more urgent, like an aggressive version of AUTOMATICS bathed in choruses by YO LA TENGO with an especially angry Ira Kaplan between the irreverent waves of feedback, paying a particular homage to Lou Reed. “Abisal” starts off with an instrumentation that is an authentic wall of electricity, impassable, as strong as an ocean that marks the separation between two worlds – the world of noise and the world of melody. RINGO DEATHSTARR meets DROP NINETEENS. The release of this digital single is accompanied by the presentation of a fantastic summer video, a collage of colors superimposed in infinite layers in which you can see the group having fun with the electric shock of a song that is destined to be one of the stars of their repertoire. The video, directed by Javi Camino (Magnetova), is one of his more interesting and imaginative pieces. Enjoy this moment and live it up, maybe it will last forever, we think it will, but either way, it is definitely a once in a lifetime experience“

“Rolling Stone recently sat down with Crosby, Stills & Nash to go track by track through their landmark 1969 debut album. Recorded before Neil Young joined their ranks, it contains many of their most enduring songs. “We were in love with each other at the time we recorded that album,” Graham Nash says. “We were new friends discovering new parts about each other and we had songs. And we had the ability to translate those songs into records that was astounding and we knew it. When we walked out of the studio with that two-track under our arm, we knew what it was going to do. We knew that it was going to be a hit. We knew that we had nailed something that wasn’t really that popular kind of then. It was all Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and stuff and here comes this little acoustic record.” Here’s the story behind seven songs from Crosby, Stills & Nash:

“Guinnevere”David Crosby: “That is a very unusual song, it’s in a very strange tuning with strange time signatures. It’s about three women that I loved. One of whom was Christine Hinton, the girl who got killed who was my girlfriend, and one of whom was Joni Mitchell and the other one is somebody that I can’t tell. It might be my best song.”Graham Nash: “Crosby sent me a tape of ‘Guinnevere’ in 1968 and it was one of the things that [made me] really realize that this man was a profound thinker and a great musician. I still have people coming up to me saying, you know, ‘I broke my hand trying to play “Guinnevere.” ‘ Until David reminds ‘em that it’s in a tuning. ‘Guinnevere’ and ‘Déjà Vu’ were on the same tape and it was then that I realized that Crosby was something special. And we’ve had a great time singing that song ‘cause we never do it the same way twice.”

“Long Time Gone”Crosby: “I wrote that right after they assassinated Bobby Kennedy. It was a result of losing him, of losing John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I started to feel overwhelmed. It seemed as if it was ballot by bullet. It seemed as if it didn’t matter how good a person we could find to put up as an inspiration and a leader for the good, that somehow the other side would triumph by simply gunning them down.”Nash: “The art of being a songwriter is to take an incident that happens to you personally and be able to translate that into something that everybody that listens to the songs can understand.”

“Wooden Ships”Crosby: “That was written by Paul Kanter and Stephen Stills and myself on my boat in Florida. It’s one of my most favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. I really love what it says, I really love how unusual it is and I really love the harmonies. It’s definitely a science fiction song, no question.”Nash: “I immediately revert back to what’s happening today. Personally I think that Stephen’s solo in ‘Wooden Ships’ gets better every time I hear it. And he played one in Wolf Trap in Virginia the night before last that had me shaking my head it was so beautiful.”

“Marrakesh Express”Nash: “In 1966 I was visiting Morocco on vacation to Marrakesh and getting on a train and having a first-class ticket and then realizing that the first-class compartment was completely fucking boring, you know, ladies with blue hair in there — it wasn’t my scene at all. So I decide I’m going to go and see what the rest of the train is like. And the rest of the train was fascinating. Just like the song says, there were ducks and pigs and chickens all over the place and people lighting fires. It’s literally the song as it is — what happened to me.”

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”Stephen Stills: “It was the beginnings of three different songs that suddenly fell together as one. Actually on the demo the middle part is not exactly how they would play. Half of it is it just falls off in its own — but we actually split it in half, and they got started singing and boom, there it went. Once it all was there then we just kept adding parts. When I wrote it I used cardboard shirt-blocking, you know those things from the cleaner’s — ‘cause they were harder to lose than pieces of paper and they didn’t crumple up. I could line them up on music stands and they’d stand up.”Nash: “Probably one of my favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. It’s very easy for me to play ‘cause I don’t. Stephen’s the only one that plays on the ‘Suite.’ “

“Helplessly Hoping”Nash: “We wrote that with a lot of alliteration. The first time we recorded it was here in New York City at the Record Plant in December 1968. Paul Rothchild was helping us with the record. We did two songs: ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ and ‘Helplessly Hoping.’ “Crosby: “I loved it as a song and I loved what happened with it. We got very lucky, very fortunate with the harmonies on that one. They came out extremely well. We still play it every night.”

“You Don’t Have To Cry”Nash: “That was first song we ever sang together. It was in Joni Mitchell’s living room.”Stills: “No, it was at Cass Elliot’s dining room table. In the corner in a stucco room, near the kitchen and the pool.”Crosby: “Nope, sorry.”Stills: “I would’ve never song for the first time with you guys in front of Joni Mitchell. [Laughs] Well, she was too intimidating.”Crosby: “You did.”Stills: “I did not.”Crosby: “You did.”Stills: “The second time …”Crosby: “You did.”Stills: “The second time …”Crosby: “The very first time.”Stills: “I’m never giving this up ever ‘cause I can smell it, I can remember.”Crosby: “I don’t care.”Nash: “You don’t have to.”Crosby: “You can welcome to it, man, you’re wrong. But it’s okay, we love you anyway.”Stills: “Yeah, well then quit with a smug look, ‘cause you’re wrong.”Crosby: “No, I’m not.”Stills: “We’ve been fighting about this for 40 years — actually since our last tour especially.”

“Decades into a brilliant (and brilliantly obscure) career, the Brian Jonestown Massacre outlived a lot of the bands they inspired, even those that rose to greater acclaim than Anton Newcombe and his rotating cast of a backing band ever would playing his songs of perfectly tattered psychedelia.Revelation is the 14th full-length from the project, with Newcombe having been one of the only constants over the years, this time in complete control of writing, recording, production, and most of the performances as he laid down these tracks over a two-year period in his Berlin studio. Newcombe is joined by a scant few guests, including original BJTM member Ricky Maymi laying down a little guitar, as well as some minimal help from members of Les Big Byrd, Asteroid No. 4, and Dimmer drummerConstantine Karlis. Much like 2012’s Aufheben, Revelation is a pastiche of old and new influences, trading in some of the Krautrock influence and extended jams of the albums before it for murkier experiments with Eastern folk (as on the crumbling lo-fi acoustics and woodwinds of “Second Sighting”), ornate goth rock with subtle horn arrangements (“Fistful of Bees,” “Food for Clouds”), and a whole lot of strung-out psychedelia. Worshiping at the altar of both the Stones in their most woolen production moments and the narcotic euphoria of Spacemen 3, the standout tracks on Revelationhappen when Newcombe does what he does best. “What You Isn’t” rides a sinister groove with minimal changes signaled by horns and feedback exchanging lines deep in the mix, calling to mind a far more wasted take on Spiritualized. Other highlights include the looming acoustic guitars of “Days, Weeks and Moths” and the devilish folk of “Unknown.” Without reinventing the wheel too much,Newcombe delivers another slice of his breed of highly evolved rock & roll genius with this album, further polishing his ever dangerous songwriting skills and offering a vivid spectrum of production, stylistic distractions, and psychedelic black holes for the listener to get swallowed up by” (AllMusic)

“A seven piece band from London, The 286 dare to cross the genres of indie rock and classical music. By clashing rock & roll riffs with cellos and violins, The 286 create a unique sound that you expect from a musical collaboration between The Beatles and Beethoven“

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Love Cop are two Portland, Oregon-based stoner romantics, transplanted from New York some years ago, who blend classic pop motifs with gothy gazed-out atmospherics and 50’s teen dreaminess. Multiple cassettes are out now on Burger Records, Gnar Tapes, and Lolipop Records. “Let’s Get High and Fuck” is a blissed out slow jam that features Brian Wakefield, aka Emotional, of SF dream pop band Melted Toys on lead guitar and production. It’s the first single from Love Cop’s upcoming album “Dark Ones” due out in late December on Gnar Tapes.

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“It’s about time someone got together a killer compilation of Time And Space Machine Mixes. From start to finish this is a full set of end to end burners – Warpaint, Jagwar Ma, Temples, Psychemagik and more all get the treatment. The perfect soundtrack to those phased-out psychedelic summer nights.” Rough Trade ShopsAmple Play Records release a heavy duty collection of Richard Norris’ recent Time And Space Machine Mixes on August 25th. A man of many guises, he has operated as a duo – as The Grid with Dave Ball, as Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve with Erol Alkan – but when it’s time for some solo sonic action, he records and remixes as The Time and Space Machine. We find him at it here: ‘The Way Out Sound From In’, reworking the most cosmic beat combos around into hitherto unheard psychedelic shapes. Warpaint, Jagwar Ma, Temples, Psychemagik, The Sufis and more fall into the Time and Space Machine and come out the other side with wider grins and shinier eyes. It’s The Way Out Sound From In….all aboard.“I’m lucky enough to work with some of my favourite artists. I try to stay true to them while adding technicolor and hypnosis to the mix.” Richard Norris

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“Deluxe is an Electro-pop band, located in New Haven, CT. The band started in 2009 but was semi abandoned till 2011 with the recording of “Colour.” Deluxe’s new self-titled album utilizes multiple instruments including analog synths, drum machines/live drums, granular synthesis, guitar, and bass to create unique yet catchy ambient pop music. Now that sounds weird, huh?”